Tonight’s marketing class featured another popular case by the folks at Harvard Business Review. This one focused on the Mountain Man Brewing Company’s decision whether to launch a lite version of their popular beer for coal miners. Again, it was another case with a corny made-up sounding name. Yeah, the name of the company and their product sounded perfectly like something that would be popular in West Virginia. For purposes of the analysis of this case, it didn’t really matter much whether the names were real or not. They were distracting, but the names didn’t matter that much.
The problem with a beer for rugged, blue collar workers having a lite option should be pretty glaring. I’m sure all the coal miners are watching their figures. Unless you’re a coal miner, who really knows what goes on that far under ground? Maybe it’s like the West Virginia equivalent of Brokeback Mountain. Considering common coal miner ailments such as black lung, the desire for a lite beer is probably not driven by coal miners’ typical focus on health consciousness.
But while the idea of a company that makes a beer called Mountain Man Lager creating a lite beer seems far-fetched, there are some compelling reasons to consider doing this. The case pointed out that lite beers were all the rage, especially among women, the well-to-do and college age crowds. Mountain Man Brewing Company wasn’t capitalizing on those groups. Sticking with its current product only would lead to a projected loss of 2% of Mountain Man’s revenue each year. It was apparent that if the company went with this offering having pictures of coal miners on the bottle wouldn’t work out too well. Maybe pictures of hikers would do better. You know, pictures of the types who live in cities, rail on about fixing the environment, drives their gas guzzling SUVs and mini-vans loaded with three or four kids (for reasons of safety, of course), buys their clothes at REI just to look the part. In other words, they are people who are trying to luck bad-ass and like they belong on a bottle of beer, but just can’t be believed, maybe like the illustrations on bottles of Rogue Ales.
Anyway, it was another fun case that taught me a lot about marketing and brand management. Just six more cases to go this semester.
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